Writing Assessment

 It has been a busy couple of weeks: The move to a new state, setting up an apartment for my daughter and me, and working on my new classroom (thanks to my wife, a master classroom organizer)! Now it is nearly time to get down to business: The kids come next Thursday! I have been preparing for beginning of the year (BOY) writing assessment, making slight revisions to the assessment tasks we used for several years in my Comprehensive Writing Instruction research project. I thought that I would share these writing assessments here, beginning with our basic formative writing assessment. Because we were teaching sentence composing and sentence punctuation (see Sentence Imitation post) very thoroughly and also using some exercises to build students' writing fluency, we wanted an assessment that we could use to monitor students' growth in what I would call writing foundational skills. I tinkered with this tool for a couple of years, primarily shortening the amount of time that the students had to write (due to the fact that they were writing so much by the second half of the year!) in order to ensure that scoring would be manageable. We ended up with what I call the Three-Minute Writing Assessment, and we generally found that it provided very useful data. The assessment looks like this:

1. Task: Students write on a basic prompt for 3 minutes. Our BOY prompt is "Write about what you like to do on a sunny day. You don't have much time, only 3 minutes, but try to make it your best writing." I will plan to give this 3-minute assessment every 6 weeks as a progress monitoring task to check in on students' developing writing fluency and sentence composing. Later prompts will include "Describe your favorite place," "Describe your favorite family activity or day," etc... 

2. At the end of three minutes, the students may finish the sentence that they are writing. 

3. Analysis: In the end, this task gives a teacher a short writing sample that they can use to analyze any feature that is of particular interest to them. My scoring in the CWI project included...

a.   Number of words

b.     Average number of words per sentence (divide writing into grammatically correct sentences)

c.     Number of compound/complex sentences (compound-complex sentences count for both)

d.     Sentences / non-sentences (as written/punctuated – non-sentences include fragments, run-ons, grammatical flaws that severely disrupt meaning)

e.     Sentence end punctuation & Capital letters (sentence caps, I, proper nouns) - correct/possible

f.      Commas – correct/incorrect or missing (include all correct commas; incorrect = taught items like commas missing from compound/complex sent; items in series)

To score many of these items, I first read the text and, when necessary, divide it into correctly punctuated/grammatically correct (approximately) sentences. Our students were writing electronically, so I copied their text and divided it into sentences, with each sentence on a new line.

The analysis table looks like this:

	Words	Average sentence length	Compound Sentences	Complex sentences	Sentences correct/ possible	Sentence end punctuation correct/ possible	Capitals correct / total	Commas correct/ incorrect- missing
1
2

4. Scores are recorded on a class chart and analyzed for class/student trends

Just to give a little idea of what student texts look like, here is the BOY and late fall responses of a 5th grade student:

#1

On a sunny summer day I like to go to amusement park with my friends.

Once I was at elitches and we were going on the Tower of Dome.

When we got in line we were getting nervous.

Then we got on it. 

#2

I have many fun fall memories but here is one.

It was the weekend, and I had slept in.

When I woke up, it felt different so I ran to the window to lift up the blind.

I had woken up to the first snowfall of the year.

The backyard was covered in snow and my trampoline was covered in snow.

I ran back into my room to get dressed right away and dashed down stairs to get my snow clothes.

I pulled on my hat and zipped up my coat as fast as I could.

Then I ran out the door into the magical feeling yard.

I rolled around made snow angels and tried to make snowballs.

Then after a while, my brother decided to join me.

We played together and had a snow ball fight for like an hour.

Finally we went back inside starving for breakfast.

That was one of my fall memories.

At this point, the students wrote for 5 minutes, and you can see why we moved to 4 minutes and then to 3 in order to make the analysis reasonable. Hopefully, you can also see the usefulness of the assessment as a quick temperature check on students' foundational skills in writing. We found that the samples gave real insight into whether instruction and practice on writing fluency, sentence structures, and punctuation was having the desired effective on student writing. This year, because I am going to emphasize "100% Words" - the spelling of higher frequency writing words - I may also include a column for spelling of words on our 100% List. Overall, I am excited to see how this Three-Minute Assessment plays out and plan to look at correlations to the more sophisticated genre writing assessments that I will give beginning/end of year. I was going to describe those assessments here as well, but this post is long enough already. I will plan to share my narrative, informational, and analytic assessments in a new post in the coming week. I will also share, in general terms, the insights that I gained from analyzing the BOY Three-Minute Assessment. If you have any thoughts or questions about the Three-Minute Writing Assessment, leave a comment below!

 

 

 

Sentence Imitating as a Brief Writing Routine

 

I am very excited to implement and research the brief writing routine that we call Sentence Imitating with a class of 5th graders that has a high percentage of emergent bilinguals. I developed the Sentence Imitating routine for 3rd/5th grade teachers in a past research project. The brief daily/near daily routine focuses on the goals of teaching students to use target connectives (e.g., although) and sentence structures (compound, complex, etc...). Here is an example of a typical lesson, in this case introducing the connective although:

The lessons move forward in basically the same fashion (in many cases, more focused on the sentence structure than a specific connective word), sticking with the same structure or connective for several days/weeks. We really like the use of the final sentence sessions step (Fearn & Farnan, 2001), as it serves as an important bridge between the task of writing a single sentence that closely imitates a model and the greater challenge of employing target sentence structures and connectives while composing connected text. Here, for example, is a sentence session response employing  the expository phrase "in comparison."

  

We had great success with the Sentence Imitating lessons, which we wrote about a few years ago in our article on Teaching Vocabulary for Application in The Reading Teacher, and the teachers felt that it was especially helpful for their small number of emergent bilinguals--hence my excitement for implementing it in my new setting. I am currently working to extend the original lessons to move beyond compound and complex sentences and expository phrases (similarly, in contrast, etc...) to introductory phrases and other sentence elements. Given that I am planning for the class to engage in the Sentence Imitation routine consistently, the focal structures will definitely be something that I will plan to assess. I was planning to share our basic 3-minute progress monitoring writing assessment in this post, which will be one way that I will assess students' use of the target sentence structures. However, this post is feeling long enough, so I will focus the next post on my writing assessments, including the 3-minute formative assessment for writing foundational skills. If you have any thoughts or questions on Sentence Imitation, leave a comment below!